Do Hedge Funds Exploit Rare Disaster Concerns?
George P. Gaoy, Pengjie Gaoz, and Zhaogang Songx
First Draft: July 2012 This Draft: July 2016
Abstract
We …nd hedge funds that have higher return covariation with a disaster concern index, wihch we develop through out-of-the-money puts on various economic sector indices, earn signi…cantly higher returns in the cross section. We provide substantial evidence that these funds have better skills in exploiting the market’s ex ante rare disaster concerns (SED), which may not realize as disaster shocks ex post. In particular, high-SED funds on average outperform low-SED funds by 0:96% per month, but have less exposure to disaster risk. They continue to deliver superior future performance when SED is estimated using the disaster concern index purged of disaster risk premium, and have leverage-managing and extreme-market-timing abilities. We also provide strong evidence against alternative interpretations.
Keywords: Rare disaster concern; hedge fund; skill JEL classi…cations: G11; G12; G23
We would like to thank Warren Bailey, Sanjeev Bhojraj, Craig Burnside, Martijn Cremers, Zhi Da, Christian Dorion, Itamar Drechsler, Ravi Jagannathan, Bob Jarrow, Alexandre Jeanneret, Andrew Karolyi, Soohun Kim, Veronika Krepely, Tim Loughran, Bill McDonald, Roni Michaely, Pam Moulton, Narayan Naik, David Ng, Maureen O’Hara, Sugata Ray, Gideon Saar, Paul Schultz, David Schumacher, Berk Sensory, Mila Getmansky Sherman, Laura Starks (the editor), Shu Yan, Jianfeng Yu, Lu Zheng, Hao Zhou, and two anonymous referees for their helpful discussions and comments, as well as seminar participants at the City University of Hong Kong, Cornell University, HEC Montreal, University of Notre Dame, the 2013 China International Conference in Finance, the 2013 EFA Annual Meeting, the 2013 FMA Annual Meetings, the 2014 MFA Annual Meetings, the 2015 AFA Annual Meetings, the 3rd Luxembourg Asset Management Summit, the 6th Paris Hedge Fund Research Conference, Texas A&M University, and University of Hawaii. We are especially grateful to Zheng Sun for help on clustering analysis; Kuntara Pukthuanthong for data on benchmark factors; and Sang Seo and Jessica Wachter for data on model-implied option prices. Financial support from the Q-group is gratefully acknowledged. The RIX index and its components are available from authors’ websites for academic use. The analysis and conclusions set forth are those of the authors and do not indicate concurrence by the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System. ySamuel Curtis Johnson Graduate School of Management, Cornell University. Email: [email protected]; Tel: (607) 255–8729 zFinance Department, Mendoza College of Business, University of Notre Dame. E-mail: [email protected]; Tel: (574) 631-8048. xCarey Business School, Johns Hopkins University. E-mail: [email protected]. Tel: (410)-234-9392 2 1 Introduction
Prior research on hedge fund performance and disaster risk focuses on the covariance between fund returns and ex post realized disaster shocks. In the time series, a number of hedge fund investment styles, characterized as de facto sellers of put options, incur substantial losses when the market goes south (Mitchell and Pulvino (2001) and Agarwal and Naik (2004)). In the cross section, individual hedge funds have heterogeneous disaster risk exposure, and funds with larger exposure to disaster risk usually earn higher returns during normal times, followed by losses during stressful times (Agarwal, Bakshi, and Huij (2010); Jiang and Kelly (2012)). At its face value, the existing evidence suggests that hedge funds are much like conventional assets in an economy with disaster risk: they earn higher returns simply by being more exposed to disaster risk.
We provide novel evidence that some hedge fund managers with skills in exploiting ex ante market disaster concerns, which may not be realized as ex post disaster shocks, deliver superior future fund performance while being less exposed to disaster risk. Our basic idea is illustrated in
Figure 1, which plots the monthly time-series of a rare disaster concern index (RIX) we construct using out-of-the-money put options on various economic sector indices. The index value at time t is essentially equal to the price of insurance against extreme downside movements of the …nancial market from time t to (t + ) in the future (see Section 2 for details). The graph shows the following salient feature of the market’sdisaster concerns.
When market shocks occur at time t, concerns for future disasters between t and (t+) increases substantially. Most importantly, the magnitude of such increased concerns at time t seems to be enormous relative to subsequently realized losses, if any, between t and (t + ).1 This startling di¤erence between the ex ante disaster concerns and the ex post realized shocks suggests that investors may be paying a “fear premium”beyond the compensation for the disaster risk. In fact,
Bollerslev and Todorov (2011) suggest that the fear premium is a critical component of market returns. Such a fear premium can be consistent with the behavior of agents with non-expected utility or constrained agents who face market frictions and are averse to tail events (Liu, Pan, and
Wang (2005); Bates (2008); Caballero and Krishnamurthy (2008); Barberis (2013)), or consistent
1 Another feature of disaster concerns is that the index spikes not only when disaster shocks hit the market such as the LTCM collapse, the crash of Nasdaq, and the recent …nancial crisis, but also during bull markets such as the peak of Nasdaq and the market rally in October 2011.
1 with market mispricing or sentiment (Bondarenko (2004); Han (2008)). Under these circumstances, hedge fund managers with better skills in exploiting such disaster concerns or “fear premium”could deliver superior future fund performance.
How can some hedge funds exploit such ex ante disaster concerns better than others while being less exposed to the ex post realization of disaster shocks? First, some fund managers may be better than others at identifying market concerns that are fears with no subsequent disaster shocks. By supplying disaster insurance to investors with high disaster concerns, some fund managers pro…t more than others who do not possess such skills and are thus unable to take advantage of these opportunities.2 Second, even when disaster concerns are subsequently realized as disaster shocks, some fund managers may be better than others at identifying whether there is a “fear premium” beyond the compensation for realized shocks. By extracting such a “fear premium”, they pro…t more than others who do not possess such skills. Third, “di¢ culty in inference regarding ... severity of disasters ... can e¤ectively lead to signi…cant disagreements among investors about disaster risk”
(Chen, Joslin, and Tran (2012)). Di¤erent investors can have di¤erent disaster concerns with di¤erent levels of “fear premium”when the market’sdisaster concern is high, regardless of whether it is followed by a realized disaster shock or not. Some hedge fund managers may have better skills at identifying the investors who are willing to pay higher premiums for disaster insurance. From an operational perspective, even some of the standard …nancial insurance contracts, including options on …xed-income securities, currencies, and a subset of equities, are traded on over-the-counter
(OTC) markets. Thus, hedge funds with di¤erent networks may have di¤ering ability to locate investors who are willing to pay high premiums. In summary, skills in exploiting disaster concerns can contribute to higher returns for certain hedge funds, and at the same time not necessarily make them more exposed to disaster shocks.
While the covariance between hedge fund returns and ex post realized shocks helps us to under- stand hedge fund risk pro…les, it is the covariance between hedge fund returns and ex ante disaster concerns that helps us to identify skillful fund managers. In principal, when the market’s disaster concern is high, funds with more skilled managers should earn higher contemporaneous returns
2 “Supplying disaster insurance”here does not literally mean hedge funds write a disaster insurance contract to investors. As argued by Stulz (2007), hedge funds, as a group of sophisticated and skillful investors who frequently use short sales, leverage, and derivatives, are capable of supplying earthquake-type rare disaster insurance through dynamic trading strategies, market timing, and asset allocations.
2 than those with less skilled managers in supplying disaster insurance. Empirically, we measure fund skills in exploiting rare disaster concerns (SED) using the covariation between fund returns and the disaster concern index we construct.3 Consistent with our view that hedge funds exhibit di¤erent levels of skills in exploiting disaster concerns, we document substantial heterogeneity of
SED across hedge funds as well as signi…cant persistence in SED.
Our main tests focus on the relation between the SED measure and future fund performance.
In our baseline results, funds in the highest SED decile on average outperform funds in the lowest
SED decile by 0:96% per month (Newey-West t-statistic of 2:8).4 Moreover, high-SED funds exhibit signi…cant performance persistence. The return spread of the high-minus-low SED deciles ranges from 0:84% per month (t-statistic of 2:6) for a three-month holding horizon, to 0:44% per month (t- statistic of 1:9) for a 12-month holding horizon. We also show that the outperformance of high-SED funds is pervasive across almost all hedge fund investment styles. These results are inconsistent with the view that hedge funds earn higher returns on average simply by being more exposed to disaster risk. If the SED measure, as the covariation between fund returns and the disaster concern index, is interpreted as measuring disaster risk exposure, high-SED funds on average should earn lower returns (rather than the higher returns we document) because they are good hedges against disaster risk under this interpretation.
We further provide several pieces of collaborative evidence that SED captures the skills of hedge funds in exploiting disaster concerns. First, if SED captures the skill rather than disaster risk exposure of hedge funds, high-SED funds should be less exposed to disaster risk. We check whether this is the case by computing loadings of SED fund deciles on a large set of macroeconomic variables, liquidity factors, and option-based risk measures. We …nd strong evidence that high-SED funds are actually less risky than low-SED funds, consistent with the interpretation that high-SED funds posses better skills of exploiting disaster concerns. If our results are driven by some missing risk factors, then these factors have to be nearly uncorrelated with all these known risk factors,
3 In the same vein, Sialm, Sun, and Zheng (2012) use fund-of-funds return loadings on some local/non-local factors to measure the fund’slocal bias, di¤erent from the conventional risk– interpretation. 4 We also perform time series analysis on dozens of hedge fund indices from Hedge Fund Research Inc. (HFRI). In estimating regressions of hedge fund index monthly excess returns on market excess return and the rare disaster concern index (RIX), we …nd negative and statistically signi…cant RIX loadings for the majority of HFRI investment strategies. These results con…rm that the payo¤s of hedge fund strategies resemble the payo¤s of writing put options, and hence these strategies are sensitive to extreme downside market movements (Lo (2001); Goetzmann et al. (2002, 2007); Agarwal and Naik (2004)).
3 which seems to be unlikely.
Second, given that our original RIX measure is the price of a disaster insurance contract that contains compensations for both objective disaster shocks (rational disaster risk premiums) and pure “concerns” (or “fears”) about disaster risk, we purge the disaster risk premium from RIX based on the stochastic disaster risk model of Seo and Wachter (2014) and re-estimate funds’SED.
These SED estimates capture the fund skills in exploiting the pure “concerns”on disaster risk more directly. We continue to observe high-SED funds strongly outperform low-SED funds with these
SED estimates, collaborating that high-SED funds earn higher returns because of their superior skills in exploiting rare disaster concerns.
Third, we expect high-SED funds to have better abilities of managing leverage and timing extreme market condition if SED captures skills because both are integrated parts of any disaster episodes. We calculate the leverage implied by RIX and estimate each fund’s ability in managing leverage. We …nd that high-SED funds do have leverage-managing ability: they reduce exposure to market-wide leverage shocks when the market leverage condition worsens and the market is on de-leverage. Moreover, we estimate each fund’s extreme-market-timing ability and …nd that high-
SED funds on average have strong bear-market-timing ability. Both results are consistent with the interpretation of SED as measuring the fund skills, though we note that such evidence is only suggestive because of the lack of fund-level data on portfolio holdings, investment positions, and balance sheets.
We also provide strong empirical evidence against alternative interpretations. First, the higher average returns high-SED funds earn over the full sample are just a result of better performance during normal times and (hypothetically) worse performance during stressful times that are too short in our sample period of 1996 - 2010. In other words, the high-SED funds are “lucky”in our sample period. We perform a conditional test of SED-sorted fund portfolios during both normal and stressful market times, but …nd that high-SED funds (based on either the original version of
RIX, or the version of RIX purged of the disaster risk premium) outperform low-SED funds even more during stressful market times, including the severe 2008 …nancial crisis. Such evidence is inconsistent with the “luck” interpretation and favors our skill-based explanation of hedge fund performance.
Second, as the spikes in the RIX factor often occur when disaster shocks hit the market, it is
4 possible that some of our high-SED funds earn pro…ts by purchasing –rather than selling –disaster insurance before the disaster shock: these funds realize large positive payo¤s when such disastrous outcomes hit the market. Among the credit-style hedge fund sample, we identify a potential set of such funds and …nd even stronger SED e¤ects on future fund performance after excluding them from our portfolio analysis. Moreover, we explore a general identi…cation condition for the funds purchasing disaster insurance: time t 1 returns of these funds, who pay a cost to buy disaster insurance before disastrous events at time t, should have signi…cant negative loadings on the RIX at time t. Accordingly, we identify funds with skills of purchasing disaster insurance by regressing the fund’s monthly excess return at t 1 on the next-period RIX at t. We …nd that there is no signi…cant return di¤erence between low- and high-exposure funds, contradicting the interpretation of high-SED funds as purchasing disaster insurance. These results provide further support that the skills of high-SED fund managers are to identify the existence and magnitude of the “fear premium” and sell insurance contracts against future disaster events, rather than forecasting the disaster event and buying disaster insurance beforehand.
Third, we investigate whether high-SED funds are those that exploit insurance associated with intermediate rather than extreme tails of the market. The answer is unequivocally no. In particular, we capture the intermediate tails of the market by the VIX given that it does not include extreme volatility shocks induced by the extreme tail events (i.e., those captured by RIX). We …nd that hedge fund portfolios formed on the covariation between fund excess returns and VIX (analogous to SED) have no signi…cant return spreads. Moreover, sequential sorts show that SED, even in the presence of potential fund skills in exploiting intermediate tails, well explains cross-sectional hedge fund returns, but not vice versa. Collectively, these results suggest that fund skills in exploiting disaster concerns rather than concerns on intermediate tail events explain cross-sectional hedge fund performance.
Throughout the paper, we also compute risk-adjusted abnormal returns using the Fung and
Hsieh (2001) eight-factor model and the ten-factor model recently developed by Namvar, Phillips,
Pukthuanthong, and Rau (2014; NPPR (2014) hereafter). The return di¤erence between the high- and low-SED funds remains highly signi…cant. Speci…cally, funds in the highest SED decile on average outperform funds in the lowest SED decile by 1:27% and 0:80% per month with Newey-
West t-statistics of 3:8 and 2:8 relative to the Fung-Hsieh and NPPR models, respectively. In
5 addition, we conduct portfolio analysis and Fama-MacBeth (1973) regressions to account for hedge fund characteristics and a number of risk factors developed in the hedge fund literature, including market risk, downside market risk (Ang, Chen, and Xing (2006)), volatility risk (Ang et al. (2006)), market liquidity risk (Pastor and Stambaugh (2003); Acharya and Pedersen (2005); Sadka (2006);
Hu, Pan, and Wang (2013)), funding liquidity risk (Brunnermeier and Pedersen (2009); Mitchell and Pulvino (2012)), macroeconomic risk (Bali, Brown, and Caglayan (2011)), and hedge fund total variance risk (Bali, Brown, and Caglayan (2012)). Our results remain similar in these extended analyses.
In addition, we show that our results are robust to alternative measures of ex ante disaster concerns such as the ones based on the S&P 500 index and long-maturity (90-day) options. Our results also survive a battery of robustness checks including di¤erent choices of portfolio weight, fund size, fund back…lling bias, fund delisting returns, fund December and non-December returns, di¤erent benchmark models, and di¤erent hedge fund databases.
Our paper mainly contributes to the literature studying hedge fund skills and cross-sectional fund performance.5 The SED measure is distinct from other fund skill variables in predicting future fund performance, including the skill in hedging systematic risk (Titman and Tiu (2011)), the skill in adopting innovative strategies (Sun, Wang, and Zheng (2012)), the skill in timing market liquidity (Cao et al. (2013)), and the conditional performance measure of downside returns (Sun,
Wang, and Zheng (2013)).
The remainder of the paper is organized as follows. Section 2 describes the construction of our rare disaster concern index. Section 3 presents the SED measure and its properties across the pool of hedge funds. Section 4 reports our baseline results of cross-sectional fund performance based on SED and provides collaborate evidence for the interpretation of SED as capturing fund skills in exploiting disaster concerns. We provide strong evidence against alternative interpretations in
Section 5. Section 6 provides additional results and robustness checks, and Section 7 concludes.
The Appendix provides technical details, and a separate Internet Appendix provides open interest statistics of index options and additional analyses of SED portfolios.
5 Recent studies include Aragon (2007), Fung, Hsieh, Naik, and Ramadorai (2008), Liang and Park (2008), Agarwal, Daniel, and Naik (2009), Aggarwal and Jorion (2010), Li, Zhang, and Zhao (2011), Titman and Tiu (2011), Cao, Chen, Liang, and Lo (2013), and Sun, Wang and Zheng (2012, 2013), among others.
6 2 Quantify Rare Disaster Concerns
In this section, we develop a rare disaster concern index (RIX) to quantify the ex ante market expectation about disaster events in the future, building on the model-free implied volatility mea- sures of Carr and Madan (1998), Britten-Jones and Neuberger (2000), Carr and Wu (2009), and Du and Kapadia (2012). In particular, the value of RIX depends on the price di¤erence between two option-based replication portfolios of variance swap contracts. The …rst portfolio accounts for mild market volatility shocks, and the second for extreme volatility shocks induced by market jumps associated with rare event risk. By construction, the RIX is equal to the insurance price against extreme downside market movements in the future. Over time, the RIX signals variations of ex ante disaster concerns.
2.1 Construction of RIX
Consider an underlying asset whose time-t price is St. We assume for simplicity that the asset does not pay dividends. An investor holding this security is concerned about its price ‡uctuations over a time period [t; T ]. One way to protect herself against price changes is to buy a contract that delivers payments equal to the extent of price variations over [t; T ], minus a prearranged price.
Such a contract is called a “variance” swap contract as the price variations are essentially about the stochastic variance of the price process.6 The standard variance swap contract in practice pays
S 2 S 2 S 2 ln t+ + ln t+2 + + ln T St St+ ST minus the prearranged price VP. That is, the variance swap contract uses the sum of squared log returns to measure price variations, which is a standard practice in the …nance literature (Singleton
(2006)).
In principle, replication portfolios consisting of out-of-the-money (OTM) options written on St can be used to replicate the time-varying payo¤ associated with the variance swap contract and hence to determine the price VP. We now introduce two replication portfolios and their implied prices for the variance swap contract. The …rst, which underlies the construction of VIX by the
6 The variance here refers to stochastic changes of the asset price, and hence is di¤erent from (and more general than) the second-order central moment of the asset return distribution.
7 CBOE, focuses on the limit of the discrete sum of squared log returns, determines VP as
2er 1 1 IV C(St; K;T )dK + P (St; K;T )dK ; (1) K2 K2 ZK>St ZK